With Support From

Latest Episode

By popular request, we delve into the smelly enterprise of essential oils. Listen as we use stinky goo to treat Carrie's headaches and broken arm, Ross's acne and sore shoulder, and elite special guest star and comedian Drew Spears's his cerebral palsy. Show notes

From the intro of the beautiful "Be Real Black for Me" by Donny Hathaway and past Sound guest Roberta Flack came two of my favorite hip-hop tracks: first M.O.P.'s "World Famous," then Scarface's "My Block."

Doctorow asks writers considering self-publishing to ask themselves the question "why should anyone care?" It's an important one, and one that's not asked enough. So often, we get so tied up in our own passions, the ones that drove us to create in the first place, that we forget to consider what our audience might want.

That should be an essential question when you create: how will this excite people enough that they will want it? Want it so much that they'll pay for it, or seek it out when it's inconvenient? Am I, as a creator, willing to pave that road?

I love Fresh Air's "rock historian" Ed Ward. He really nails it every time out - even when he covers stuff I know a lot about I learn something, and I'm never lost when he covers something I've never heard of.

On this week's JJGo, I talked about the amazing Pakistani-Indian border sequence of Michael Palin's Himalaya. Here it is in all its late-80s-African-American-gay-man-living-in-Paris-wearing-a-headdress-and-stomping glory. One of the greatest things of all time.